What's at stake is a virtual science fiction world of the future where interstellar travel and colonization of new planets are made possible in a way that no other merely technological path makes available. If we could actually do fusion in sustained and controllable ways it would be one of the giant steps to go along with walking, talking, and thinking.
If you combine advancements in fusion with advancements in genetic engineering and molecular biology, you get one of the most vast extensions of human culture ever imagined. Sure we could kill ourselves off or imprison ourselves until mother nature of Terra finished us off at her leisure. But really folks, if there is a slim chance to escape that fate, it will be found in these sorts of fucking wonders. We are talking secrets of the universe and levels of physical mysticism that reach into the primodial stuff of all that is.
Well, okay I'll keep it simple and stupid. It is work that has to be done, even if the dangers could be to wipe us out.
Think about the concept that life is a biochemical machine with little trollies, pullies, little chemical robots that pick up this little thing from one place and stick into some complex pattern building thing in another place--after the robot twists the little shape to fit. The combination of all of these little factories, is a human thought, maybe an equation series about that process.
I suppose I shouldn't go over the top, but the ability to control nucleosynthesis is a very, very big deal. In the grandest scale, it means you can create another universe within this one. The way I want to look at it, comes from Jose Clemente Orozco, Man of Fire, the fresco dome in the Guadalajara orphanage. Promethesus Unchained.
I don't have the stuff. But I know others do, giants, guys like Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Dirac, de Broglie or the mathematicians like Minkowski, Hilbert, Poincare, Weyl, von Neumann would have seen it in a flash, and would have died to work there... Their greed to get the answers would have driven them into spectacular heights and unimagined flights. It would have been beauty beyond conception. Or a darkness so profound, we mortals would rue the day we ever give it utterance. Whatever. The one thing it wouldn't be was bland. Death of the bland. Well, were we are at the moment.
CG